Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Sandro jumped into the sea, did not dive, which Alec thought strange. He knew that a man overboard from a boat under racing sail was all but a man lost, but the boat was moving loosely and all her sail was down. As for sharks and all that lay under the sea, the only way to meet them was with unbelief, or, to put it more positively, faith in something else. Alec thought Sandro might still be at the immortal stage of his life.

  Preceded by a plume of bubbles, Sandro’s head came up close to the boat. He swam to the stern and dived under the boat.

  Nick meanwhile had let down the steps.

  Sandro called up from the water: ‘She’s clean.’

  ‘Where’s the kite got to?’ shouted Logan.

  ‘Melted in threads. Sunk.’ Sandro used the words that came to him first after his deep dive into a blue that did not hear voices and through which time seemed to stretch and boom like a drumskin. His ears were drilling towards one another through his head.

  I am cold, he thought, and came out of the water laughing in shock.

  ‘Give us a hand folding the mainsail. That’ll dry you out,’ said Logan.

  At night the sails were checked every fifteen minutes by whoever was on watch. If there had to be a sail-change they all got up to help. The sails were blue by night sometimes, sometimes grey. Alec was surprised at how the palette of the Pacific night was full of white, like the nights of the North. The speed they made was mysterious in the dark; they felt to Alec like a company confidential and outlawed as well. The Pacific seemed undiscovered, a great country that could not reveal itself because it had no consistency but its own nature to display, that took no account of human life.

  When night came, although it might be clear and full of stars, to Alec it was obscure, because he could not think of words or images that would later remind him of this time. He was not surprised by that, but he wanted to remember and feared that once back within the parentheses of his life he would forget this vast fearful place because he would have no picture in his head to remember it by. Increasingly, he pored over the charts on the table like a mystic over texts. They looked nothing like the place, conveyed nothing of its height nor depth nor any other thing, but they made manifest the little that was known about the Pacific.

  At night the boat became a thing so buoyant it might have been weightless. Alec stayed up to see the sun sink and was on watch for its arrival each morning. To see for as far as one can to the edges of sight only sea at dawn is to start the day resolved to make it good since it has arrived so perfect. Each day was like a resolution itself, taking from him the burden of himself as he tended the boat. He was serving a late maritime novitiate on Ardent Spirit.

  At last after these reordered, watch-shaped days he began to trust those around him, because he had to, it is true, but the trust he had that they would conspire to stay alive, which was what he also wanted, made him realise that any thoughts he had had of despair in his life were frivolous; he wanted to stay alive.

  He began vividly to dream of Lorna, and to write to her. Nick was writing to his wife, he said. He wrapped the notebook in an inflatable pocket when he had finished.

  ‘In case it could float. Like in a bottle.’

  ‘Are you planning some misadventure?’

  ‘It’s not up to me. I’m just careful. It’s like having no green on board.’

  Sure enough, there was no green on board.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I could make up plenty of reasons. I guess it’s because if you have a few simple superstitions and obey them even if you don’t understand them, you may ward off whatever it is so that it passes on to the guy who has green on board or says “Macbeth” or whatever it is.’

  Towards the next destination, Tonga, tropic birds began to fly astern, dipping from their hover into the wake and arising with serifs of water finishing their long wings and tails.

  The air began to be colder at night, without the bloom that tropical heat settles over everything.

  Alec began a chain of sneezes one night as he watched the vang on the mizzen boom for slippage. Each sneeze banged in his heart. I suppose I am unfit, he thought. I’ve used my arms and shoulders but we walk nowhere in the day. By the end of this long passage that he could not measure in land days, they were out of almost everything to eat except baked beans and sausages that looked like fingers with bad papercuts.

  Yet he did not pine for land. The meditative passing of the time, with tasks allotted, and the unbroken steadiness of the wind that never sank and had not changed or risen suddenly on this passage, had an effect upon the six of them that was a little like brainwashing. Because they were living to a system that was working, they trusted the system, not thinking that this time was more emptied of self than it had been before, but aware of the benefits of some alleviation they could not place.

  Logan, whose pessimism was dear to him in its impersonation of profundity and its implication of arcane knowledge, did not lay aside the pessimism, but allowed himself to fill with other feelings too. He anticipated some sort of new beginning in his life. How it would come about he was not sure, but he planned towards it and often found himself dreaming of a life after it. The event itself he avoided in his mind, however it would take place. Meanwhile, he remembered how fond he had once been of Elspeth.

  With the next one loaded and in place, a man need never grow old but take his youth from his wives. It was Gabriel’s passivity he held to be witness to her suitability. His distaste for steps not instigated by himself was thorough.

  Logan preferred to be at sea, there was no doubt of that, but so unclouded a long passage grew uneventful for him and he began to invent difficulties against which to chafe. In his character lay something fine and well made, sunk beneath his power and turbulence and over time turning into a wreck, that stirred sometimes and gave out putrefaction sometimes and sometimes a glitter that was his charm.

  It was at once apparent when they dropped anchor in the harbour at Nuku’alofa that this was a place not administered by France.

  After registering their arrival, Logan said he was going ashore. Did anyone want to come with him?

  Elspeth wanted to scour the boat within; it was her celebration of a return to land after even a short passage. Alec was growing used to this. He wondered if she performed the same expiation upon the houses they lived in. Nick said that he would post Alec’s letter to Lorna, pages of talk on to the paper of a ringbound notebook, if Alec wanted to stay and help Elspeth clean.

  Nick’s grasp of the ambivalence Alec had not wanted to look into at sea was not crude. He saw, did not comment, understood human fluidity.

  Three Tongan boys in shorts had come aboard with hardwood tortoises to sell. The famous tortoise of Captain Cook had died only a few years before in the Royal Palace. Perhaps these were its effigy? The boys did not know. The biggest boy said, ‘Please give us all your baked beans and similar before the harbourmaster comes to guzzle them. My mother favours.’

  Elspeth lifted out the saloon seats and took out the few remaining tins. A roach clung to the paper label of one of the tins. She flicked it off. No one wanted to kill the creatures directly by squashing them. The crack and release of oyster-sized innards was unpleasant. A fear of multiplication through death in insects seemed to stop them, too, a kind of medieval theory of spontaneous generation. The roach Elspeth had flicked away walked off with sectioned purposefulness.

  She found some marmalade and two tins of Swiss Fondue and a jar of confiture aux myrtilles, and handed them over.

  ‘Don’t have them together, perhaps.’

  ‘Is it likely?’ asked the youngest boy. He had hair rough in texture like the other boys’ and the same height and solidity and bulk of face, but his hair was a kind of rough gold.

  ‘We’ll be off if there’s nothing else you want,’ said the oldest boy. They had arrived just after the departure of the Zodiac with Logan, Sandro, Nick and Gabriel. Elspeth heard in the boy’s speech the assumption that he would be taken from
, as his people, immemoriably, had been. All his life he could take and never tip the compounded heaping of the scales.

  Elspeth went forward to her cabin and came back with her head tied up under a scarf. She had put on a dress that flapped like a scarecrow’s coat.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ asked Alec.

  ‘After, not before,’ she said.

  Beginning in the fo’c’sle they dug out mess from every cranny. Alec pumped the bilges and serviced the three heads on board. The first smells of sewage and Parazone they dismissed with the delicious sweetness of beeswax polish and Dettol.

  Elspeth kneeled on the floor of the saloon, that they had lifted and cleaned under, replacing in their compartments beneath it a foot pump and sealed packs of bandages, two bottles of champagne and fifteen bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label.

  ‘It’s the official bribe nearly everywhere,’ she said. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘Have you to bribe me?’ he asked.

  She went back to beeswax-feeding the floor. Her scarf and the floppy dress, the household smells mixed with the harbour smells, concocted a scene less romantic than their normal expected context had been for the past watch-broken days.

  What was beautiful was the plainness of the scene, and the earthbound vigour of the woman scrubbing. He thought, and went to find paper and a pencil.

  He drew Elspeth as she did the housework on the boat in the harbour.

  ‘You want flowers,’ he said.

  ‘I want more disinfectant more.’

  ‘I mean for the picture. You want some bleak daisies or wiry chrysanths. I have not seen a sight so northern, so far from the Tropics, for a while. It does me good.’

  ‘I’ll carry on, if that’s all right.’

  ‘You scrub, I’ll draw; that’s how it is with artists and women,’ he said, but she was not looking at his face, so he had to make an ironic cough to show his meaning, and that was clumsy.

  ‘Where did you get your passion for a tidy boat?’ he asked her. ‘Does it extend to houses?’

  ‘I started tidying places I lived as soon as I began living away from home. Our house was not filthy but its disorder was held to show the purity of my parents’ ideals; and they were pure. But I didn’t see why that meant we’d to allow the cats to lick the cheese at table or why we had to have cobwebs hanging down to our faces. I wanted to live in a place with light bulbs that were not like strange rare fish that might or might not go phosphorescent if you fed them with some weak electricity from the failing wires. I wanted to see the pattern in the carpet, not to be dominated by it, but to see it. I longed for clean clothes and floors that could be trusted not to buzz with worm. And I wanted to stop my parents taking pity on everything. They included not only people in their pity. They had broken things around them too.’

  ‘What kinds of things?’

  ‘Things that might have been Jacobean high chairs and might have been parts of a wheelbarrow, hundreds of tartan boxes with transfers on of castles, stags, steamships and brigs, tables covered with powder horns and patent ironing boards for the fixing of ecclesiastical muslin and stuffed fish in lifelike positions, as if fish ever got into lifelike positions, and old nurses’ capes lined with red they thought I might want to dress up in and military buttons tied on a leather bootlace.’

  ‘The first house I went to like that, cluttered with old things, changed my life, I think.’

  ‘Well, I hung about at school hoping to get asked home by the wee girl who said you could eat your dinner off their floor. I would pointedly tidy my room and say my prayers before bed to offend their liberal free-thinking ways.’

  ‘How conventional you were.’

  ‘Now I think violent anarchic thoughts, but I have to have a tidy house.’

  ‘What was the biggest thing they took pity on?’

  ‘There were people who lived with us for months at a time, but they moved about at least and sometimes shook off the dust they collected. Most of the time I was trying to come between my parents and houses. They pursued old houses that were in danger of demolition.’

  ‘Do you know what demolition is called now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Change of use, advice and salvage. Moreover the demolition experts are furious because there’s nothing much left to demolish, which is circular.’

  ‘You remember what I said in the Chinese restaurant in Tahiti? We would come up to Edinburgh for the reasons I said to you in the restaurant, it’s true, but the main reason was to pay our respects to buildings. How I disliked it.’

  ‘Buildings were the great escape for me. I had never found anything so thrilling.’

  ‘Can it be usual to have this relationship with buildings, either way?’

  ‘It’s not usual maybe for the person to be so aware of the attachment. But the moral link with houses and streets seems to me, always has seemed, a deep one. It’s irreplaceable in children.’

  She scrubbed hard at the table, kneeling up.

  ‘Well, you are a man after my poor pa’s heart. Let’s see the picture.’

  It was a dark drawing and not kind. Elspeth looked out of it with begging eyes.

  ‘Do I look so anxious all the time? You can’t tell it’s a boat, that’s a pity.’

  ‘Usually you look about that anxious. At the moment you are looking more. The mysterious thing is that it’s stopped being a boat just for now. Tell me about the houses you trailed round. I will have been the boy with an old woman or a brindle dog and his owner that you just did not see as you drooped about counting to a hundred and wishing for an ice-cream with your dad.’

  He was writing himself into her story. If she took this from him, he would know how it was with her. Then, he might make some move.

  ‘Maybe. We would go in to houses full of twigs. They’d been empty so long, in the city right enough, that the jackdaws nesting in the chimney had sent down sufficient twigs to fill a room. Some landlords just lit the twigs after a good dook of paraffin. Some picked a few slates off the roof to help the rain in. Plenty knocked down whole squares, absolutely within the law.’

  ‘You are angry about it now. It’s caught up with you.’

  ‘Now it is almost too late. Even places like this, that were once remote, are being developed. Life is being speeded up beyond the human. You’re right, I didn’t care when I was dragged as I saw it around all these condemned streets and houses, and now I care enough to want to go back and live in them, even.’

  ‘It’s the obvious question. Do you dream of them?’

  ‘One of the reasons I long for sleep is to be back with the houses that have been destroyed. If that could be death, walking a resurrected city, I would not fear it. I can remember the writing in some attics, pencilled lists of names of men come to do the guttering or store apples, and girls’ names written on night-nursery windows with a diamond. I remember big houses where the owner lived in one room with a chamber pot. I wish I had listened.’

  ‘If it were not the houses it would be another thing. Only a very brusque character can refrain from going over the past again.’

  ‘It saves time if one can be free of it.’

  ‘Only if you are going to do new things every new moment of your life. I think it is good to remember the past if one is not posing it in fanciful new ways just to make one’s own case.’

  ‘I will not talk about Logan,’ she said, shocking herself.

  He decided not to have heard.

  ‘Let me take the carpet on deck with you. We can hang it over the boom and beat it.’

  ‘You are domesticated too.’

  ‘I tried to elude it, but it has come for me.’

  ‘Here we are,’ said Logan. ‘What an extraordinary sight you make, Elspeth. We have signed in with an official called Hepplewhite or Sheraton and I’ve made times for the collection of fuel, gas and water. I suggest we go ashore. I’ve met a remarkable character who’s offered us a traditional feast.’

  Demolition leads to those traditions, though
t Alec.

  ‘It is at a site,’ said Gabriel.

  Elspeth and Alec waited for more.

  Logan passed on to the other matter that had engaged him that afternoon: ‘I went to place some calls and make a couple of enquiries about a few things. It’s a pleasant town. The Palace is made of shingle, or we’d call it that in America, whitewashed. People as substantial as you’d expect, and wearing these woven girdles of palm matting. It’s a sign of respect for the royal family. The strangest thing is that on a Sunday, they tell me, the airport is closed so that one of the nobles can play with his remote-control planes. Apparently it’s the same every Sunday. I approve of that, the big planes held up by the toy ones.’

  ‘It could also be that Tongans are very devout,’ said Nick. ‘They observe the sabbath and go to church two or three times.’

  It was Nick who volunteered to stay behind on the boat while the others went to the feast, which was to be cooked in an underground oven and would feature suckling pig.

  The Zodiac was deep in the water as they set off for the harbour steps. When they got there the weed and slime made the steps treacherous and the dirty harbour water slapped up and down them. The party was met by a wide man who guided them to his Chevy pick-up. His skin was covered on cheeks and neck with small nodules of skin like the grains of dirt you rub off when you wash with a loofah. He was frantically hyperbolic, waving his dimpled arms in their blue shirtsleeves, pulling up and adjusting his long palm-mat girdle. He was smoking without stopping. They all got into the car.

  Later they picked up four more people, Americans, at a place the host called the international dateline, though it wasn’t clear to Alec if it was the thing itself or a hotel named for it. He experienced no shift in time such as he longed to feel. The remarkable brilliance of Pacific islanders in the matters of navigation and time impressed him and depressed him, for he could not see how the islanders’ new lives would use such a gift. Celestial navigation, that bent the impervious stars to human use and absorbed the brain in exercise that freed it from any but the clearest thought, was becoming redundant. Soon it would be revived only as a stunt, a card trick using tides and planets.